The present invention relates to a technique for selectively suppressing a particular audio component (hereinafter referred to as “target component”) from an audio signal.
Heretofore, various techniques have been proposed for suppressing a particular target component from an audio signal. Japanese Patent No. 3670562 (hereinafter referred to as “patent literature 1”) and Japanese Patent Application Laid-open Publication No. 2009-188971 (hereinafter referred to as “patent literature 2”), for example, discloses a technique for suppressing a front (central) localized component by multiplying individual frequency components of an audio signal by coefficient values (or attenuation coefficients) preset for individual frequencies in accordance with a degree of similarity between right-channel and left-channel audio signals of the audio signal.
However, with the technique disclosed in patent literature 1 and patent literature 2, all of localized components in a predetermined direction are uniformly suppressed, and thus, it was not possible to selectively suppress an audio component of a particular sound image from an audio signal generated in such a manner that a plurality of sound images are localized in a target direction.